I mean, from the apps perspective, everything has already been either parsed properly by the shell, or passed directly as intended in an array by another progra

I mean, from the apps perspective, everything has already been either parsed properly by the shell, or passed directly as intended in an array by another program. From the user's perspective, the shell does it the same for every program you invoke. Not all shells have exactly the same quoting rules necessarily, but it's the component that's deciding how to do it. If you're in doubt you can even ask it to print how it parses the command line you're currently writing. On Windows I can compile the same C program with two different compilers and get two different comment line parsing behaviors, which I'd say, is much less obvious to the user.